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It is said (apparently inaccurately) that the Inuit have many words for ‘snow.’ Why would that be? Why, because they see a lot of snow, of course.

English has very few words for ‘smile,’ even though we see a lot of them (I hope). Grin. Grimace. Beam. Smirk. Maybe even Simper. And you can drag in fellow travelers Squint and certainly Leer. But really, not a very large collection of descriptives for something a writer needs often.

Smile, look, walk, and similar words indicate classes of action but do not show specifics. Use them, and you leave the reader knowing what happened but not having a picture in mind. They’re placeholders for better description. Boring, as well.

All of this was grating on my mind yesterday. I was writing a three-person sequence in which a lot of smiling was going on, not all of it happy. Sure, I could tell the reader that Weezy’s smile masked anger, but how does that look?

I decided to take a break and walk around Lake of the Isles, my favorite in-city lake in Minneapolis. Usually, I use my walking time to work out plot and character issues, and that was the way I started my walk. A couple of blocks along the way, a late middle-aged man approached. He took me in, then gave the very briefest horizontal stretching of the lips in a straight line. Hard to tell whether it was a smile or gastronomic distress. That got me watching the people I encountered. A young woman gave me the “I am smiling because I’m cool but don’t get your hopes up” rictus (ahh, rictus … I missed that as a near-synonym). A young father gave me a possessive, prideful smile as his two, young bike-mounted sons ran me off the walking path. A mother’s joy-to-the-world smile as she glanced up from her baby. A hajib-wearing woman smiled with her eyes. A young packed-with-energy guy gave me a nod of recognition as he ran by, served up with a smirk. (I race walk. To him, I was surely old, hefty, and weird.) A woman gifted me a happy smile that took in her whole face – mouth, eyes, and forehead. It was the kind of smile that makes you want to know the person just to understand how she has successfully figured out the puzzle of life.

I was reminded there is no such thing as a generic smile. The smile is a creature of the structure of a face, as well as the inner beauty or turmoil of the person smiling. Guess I have to work harder on my smiles. No one said writing would be easy.

Like this:

As I pass through the stations of writing skill improvement, I am realizing that I have a custom set of writing weaknesses. I got a notion of it from critique groups … the same issues kept coming up again and again. It was cemented by the editor who raked over my second novel with a fine-toothed linguistic comb. The same problems kept recurring. For me, it was leading a sentence with description, following with action. (“Hearing a knock, John went to the door.”) Or having a character say something, then having me as narrator come along behind and tell the poor benighted reader what the character meant (rather that writing the character’s statement well enough to convey the feeling in the words). And so on. There were … ahem … many others.

Conclusory Bludgeon

Any Google search will provide a list of tens or even hundreds of these writing mistakes. It’s a little less daunting that one’s own style features a few … not all … of them.

There is an advantage of critique groups that has only recently become clear to me: It’s easier to see one’s own weaknesses in other people’s writing. As in: “The scene is engaging, but in the second paragraph, Jason’s facial expression and sigh says it all. You don’t need the sentence that tells us that Jason’s exasperated.” Oops … wait a minute … I do that too. But I don’t see it as easily (ego, perhaps?) in my own writing.

Critique of others’ work teaches me to look in the mirror, and … oops again. You already knew that without the conclusory bludgeon, didn’t you?